May contain nuts.

Let's talk about items in the game prototype (which is actually a bit more than a prototype if I look at it).

One gameplay element is finding keys / codes to open doors (although you can also hack them, but that's another story). In the first version these items were separated into Doors and searchable Items, both with a lot of duplicated code, on the item and on the player object that had to interact with these items.

After everything worked like expected (ie: walk up to a crate, press the action button and wait, find the key, walk to the door and unlock it), I started the second refactoring pass. First thing added was the ItemData class, which holds most of the vital data and exposes them to the editor. ItemData covers basic items and things in the game, a wardrobe you can search through is using ItemData as well as a bed or a crate.

Basic ItemData in place.

I already mentioned that doors are a bit tricky when it comes to making them work with generic code, so adding ItemData values to a door meant some messing. As you can see ItemData contains two fields for interaction: action and secondary (mapped to different buttons) and this also the trouble with doors. Doors (at least in this game) have more than one action, based on the door's current state (locked, closed, etc) plus different actions for the same state. If you stand in front of a locked door, but don't have the key, the action is "hack door" - if you have the key, the action is "unlock door".

Exposing that to the editor is more than a major ball ache, except you want to write your own editor panel - which I very much don't want to.

This is where inheritance comes into play. So the Door (DoorController Class) is inherited from ItemData. The trick is that the code that manages the door's state also changes the "action" of the underlying ItemData. As doors are always work the same way this doesn't have to be exposed to the editor. So when the state of the door is changed the "action" is updated based on the new state. Quick, simple and clean - not as flexible as going through the editor, but that's a small price to pay.

Another (big) advantage is that items and doors now all run through the same code for displaying button hints, tooltips and message boxes, so no special cases to tackle.

For comparision: the door's editor values.

Now that this is done, I'm going to add guards wandering around the map and I fear I also need to get my head around doing a minimap to guide your around (without being a spoiler).

... and with this, "Hail to the king and his epic saga in search for candy".